If you believe in liberty, the U.S. government now considers you a terror suspect

(NaturalNews) In this season of Independence, it’s important – and sad – to note how far we’ve come from our nation’s founding, where brave, insightful men laid everything on the line just a couple of centuries ago in an all-or-nothing effort to birth the greatest, most successful, free country in the history of the earth.

Today, holding dear such values as freedom and liberty will get you put on a terrorist list. Welcome to America 2012.

A new study funded by the Department of Homeland Security, using your tax dollars, describes Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority” and “reverent of individual liberty” as “extreme right-wing” terrorists.

The study, titled, “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008,” was produced by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland – a group seeded with $12 million in start-up funding via DHS.

To give the authors their due, there was equal and appropriate mention in the Executive Summary about left-wing extremism as well, which they said “was concentrated in the 1970s and ethno-national/separatist terrorism was concentrated in the 1970s and 1980s.”

Freedom lovers are just too ‘extreme’

But the majority of the report appears biased against so-called right-wing extremism which, the authors said “was concentrated in the 1990s, and single issue attacks were dispersed across the last three decades (1980s, 1990s, and 2000s).”

Notably, key terrorist events and the resultant description of the ideologies that drove them have also been omitted from the study, such as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamo-fanatics, and instead largely focuses on beliefs held most by conservatives and libertarians.

Here are some examples:

– Americans who believe their “way of life” is under assault.

– Individuals who are “fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation.)”

– People who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority” (and, by nature, shouldn’t every American be?)

Also listed in the study as people to watch are those who oppose abortion and “groups that seek to smite the purported enemies of God and other evildoers.”

The “study” is only the latest in an avalanche of publications generated by the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies under the current regime which portray Americans who essentially believe in the nation’s founding principles as terrorists-in-waiting.

One of the most prominent of these was a 2009 report generated by a group called the Missouri Information Analysis Center, which described supporters of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, all libertarians, people who display bumper stickers, own gold or even those who fly an American flag as potential terrorists.

History of assaulting our founding principles

There’s more.

Under the FBI’s Communities Against Terrorism program, for example, anyone who buys food in bulk (in preparation for, say, a natural disaster or a breakdown of civil society) is a supposed indicator of potential terrorist activity.

And let’s not forget DHS’ “See Something, Say Something” campaign last year, in which white Americans were primarily portrayed as being terrorists in the accompanying public service announcements.

While it’s reasonable to expect that technology and progress will change a country over the span of a couple centuries, it’s not reasonable to expect that nation’s founding principles to be assaulted and shunned by those who were elected to preserve them.

So much for paying freedom’s tab with eternal vigilance.

Welcome to America 2012. That rumbling you hear is the founding fathers rolling over in their graves.